I’m of the stern belief that the language we use to discuss our corporate communication programs shapes the way we understand what we do as professionals, the way we measure success and, ultimately, the effectiveness of engaging with the audiences we seek to reach.
All marketing disciplines have a bad habit of incorporating buzzwords without thinking them through. What’s worse, we have a knack for taking beneficial words and diluting their meaning. For instance, “community” and “authenticity” are too often used for initiatives that provide very little of either. And I increasingly see the term “listening” being bent in the same discouraging ways.
In interpersonal communication, we are aware of the distinction between “hearing” and “listening.” Hearing refers to the physical reception of noise, while listening implies an active process beyond receipt—discerning the meaning of the sound. Yet, we mix the two all too often, not only using the terms interchangeably but talking about “listening” programs that do little beyond merely recording the noise of what audiences are saying.
Major strides have been made toward improving on the tools we have available to hear online. Cymfony, Nielsen BuzzMetrics and a variety of other industry leaders have created dynamic tools capable of gathering what audiences are saying and organizing that information in increasingly sophisticated ways. Often, through measuring sentiment and providing analysis of keywords that pop up in these conversations, these tools can make a quantitative analysis of the data. But these tools and the reports that analysts provide can only making hearing as sophisticated as possible; they cannot listen for us.
HEARING IS EASY
Perhaps we’ve concentrated on the issue of hearing because it’s easier to fix. Gathering data is easier to measure, and it’s an isolated problem to fix. If a brand doesn’t have the resources to “hear” in-house, it can pay for the tools or hire the right firm to be a “hearing aid” (forgive the metaphor). However, hearing doesn’t mean much if nothing is done with the information.
Anthropologist Grant McCracken has argued in his recent book, Chief Culture Officer, that a corporation needs to become “living” and “breathing.” He says that companies have long been good at exhaling culture out (speaking) but not so good at breathing culture in (listening). I’d argue that if companies are breathing culture in, they are doing so in limited ways, with respirators.
LISTENING IS CENTRAL
Brands can’t really put their messages in motion unless they make active listening the centerpiece of all strategy. The most challenging aspect of prioritizing listening, though, is the internal coordination needed to truly make sense of the information being heard through the brand’s monitoring channels. Many of the insights that could be gleaned from the data gathered by these hearing tools are squandered because the information never makes its way to the department that needs to listen to it. Instead, at best, departments see reports of the overall numbers of what was monitored, without ever listening to any of the actual conversations taking place.
Companies ultimately have to align corporate communication, marketing, sales, customer service, human resources, legal, product development, IT and other relevant areas to ensure that the right teams are receiving important insights from these hearing mechanisms. If done correctly, brands can use active listening online to:
• Identify opportunities to reach out to relevant audiences on issues of thought leadership
• Address customer service issues
• Research how products are being discussed among current or potential customers
• Better understand target audiences or identify surplus audiences outside a brand’s expected demographics
• Adapt or solidify marketing messages
Unfortunately, many brands have not put significant effort toward truly listening until a crisis has forced them to.
Because of that, I’m afraid many brands are going to end up like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” In the poem, a traveler finds a statue in the desert with a pedestal proclaiming, “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” All that’s left on the platform is the statue’s legs, and any sign of this one-time leader’s empire has been obliterated by the sands.
Brands that don’t listen are similarly bound to end up with an empty empire as they slowly whittle their cultural cache and reputation away, never making sense of the potential insights that surround them. PRN
CONTACT:
Sam Ford is director of digital strategy at Peppercom Strategic Communications. He can be reached at [email protected].